It goes without saying I’m glad 2022 is over. It was another rough one. Good news, I’m still standing! Here’s my annual rundown of the good and bad that happened during the past year.

The good

• I kept to the meditation practice I began in 2021, which helps me sleep at night.
• I wrote a lot more for TechTarget again, reminding me that writing articles is one of my happy places.
• After an absence of over ten years, I returned to spinning class at the gym and still enjoy it as I did back in the day.
• Red Hat’s Opensource.com published an eBook collection of some of my writing about DevOps to DevSecOps transformation. It was a professional highlight of the year.
• I finally fell in love with using LucidSpark and Miro whiteboards for brainstorming and collaboration.
• I spent the extra time during my second layoff to tame my Todoist task lists by removing all the ideas I had in there and migrating them to Notion, which dramatically reduced my task lists, making me feel so much better.
• I also built a private Notion wiki during my layoff, which helped me centralize so many of the ideas and research I had begun to store in Notion

The bad

• My gym remains overrun with teenagers meaning spinning class is the only place where I can be around adults. The gym was my happy place. Now the spinning room is my happy place.
• I got caught in another layoff after being in a job for only four months which was no fun at all, but I got some freelance work to soften my landing.
• There was ample opportunity to regret some of my professional choices during the past year.
• The layoff meant canceling my summer 2022 vacation, which was a huge disappointment. Worse yet, my favorite vacation spot of Ocean City, MD, is seeing all sorts of cost hikes and closings that may mean it won’t be an affordable vacation by the time I’m ready to go.
• I applied for way too many jobs that didn’t exist and believe there’s a special place in HELL for any company that posts jobs online that have no intention of filling.
• I grew ever more tired and frustrated about living in Northern Virginia – the poor driving, parking lot accidents, entitlement, bad attitudes, and basic lack of consideration – and need to reassess and try to expedite my plans to move out of the area once and for all.
• I didn’t read for pleasure as much this year as I planned…largely due to the layoff.
• My personal writing projects and Opensource.com contributions fell off because I had to focus on billable work because of the layoff.